Building Muscle Can Build Up Your Immune System

When people are chronically ill, they can lose both muscle and fat through a process known as cachexia. Cachexia also results in having a weakened immune system. As a matter of fact, cachexia accounts for up to a third of cancer-related deaths. It can also negatively impact people afflicted with other serious conditions such as chronic kidney disease, AIDS, and heart failure.

According to scientists at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, it is believed that cachexia may be a result of the body trying to overcompensate. As it attempts to fight off a severe illness it will try to harvest muscle and fat for energy and resources. As the body struggles to ward off the illness, researchers noted that as the muscular system gets weaker, so does the immune system. This can be attributed to the T cells of an immune system becoming overtaxed and exhausted.

Therefore, this article will cover some strategies that are great for building muscle since that can build up your immune system as well. 

1. Maintain Your Own Log 

Before you even begin your exercise routine, make sure you are ready to record what exercises you’re going to do, as well as how many sets and reps of each one.

It’s very important to keep track of your best lifts and maximum reps you’ve churned out with every single exercise. When you set your benchmarks, you can constantly strive to improve your best numbers. 

2. Stick to the “Big Four”

The “big four” muscle building exercises are the bench press, shoulder press, deadlift, and squat—that’s it. No more, no less.

Although the row and chin up are good exercises to do as well, make them secondary to these first four. These additional moves can complement your bench and shoulder press, in particular, since they put your pulling muscles in balance with your pushing ones. 

3. Use barbells first 

Firstly, forget all of that trendy fitness equipment out there. The barbell is king, the dumbbell is queen, and everything beyond that is non-essential (basically the court jester).

Secondly, you always want to begin your workouts with barbell movements, such as the “big four” that we covered in #2. Barbells let you load more weight than any other piece of free-lifting equipment (non-machine). Therefore, you can make better strength and muscle gains with them.

After you’re done with your barbell exercises, you can move to dumbbell and bodyweight movements since you’ve got the heavy stuff out of the way. 

4. Keep it simple

Some fitness trainers are highly-detailed when it comes to training clients. The trainers will instruct them to lift at a certain rep speed—such as three or four seconds up and one or two seconds down. While that’s all fine and dandy for advanced lifters, the most important thing to remember is to simply count the number of reps you do during a set.

Focus on raising and lowering the weight in a controlled manner instead of jerking it up and down. To get the most out of each rep, try pausing for one second when you reach the top of the movement.

You also want to ensure that you’re constantly breathing during each set and rep. You should be exhaling every time you contract whatever muscle group you’re working on, instead of holding your breath (and turning blue in the face). 

5. Don’t overdo it 

This is a big one that is often overlooked. Try to stick to four to five lifts per workout. By keeping your workouts brief, you can take advantage of any hormonal surges. Conversely, if you perform too many exercises in a single session, you’ll only give some of them your all—the other ones will be sloppy.

Essentially, all you need to do is one main lift per workout session (one of the “big four”). Complement that with two or three assistance lifts, which keep your body in balance and further strengthen the main lift muscles.

When you’re done with those, work on specialty and/or core work. These include abdominal work, forearms, calves, and the like (tailor these to whatever your fitness goals are).

Doing any more than the above will only yield increasingly diminished returns. 

Ginseng Supplements—Koreselect Stamina

The above muscle building exercises can help in promoting a healthy and vibrant immune system, but if you want to really turbo-charge it—along with restoring your body’s energy reserves—consider Koreselect Stamina!

Koreselect Stamina has been formulated to support health performance, circulation, and immune systems with all plant-based ingredients and Korean ginseng supplements can help boost healthy performance without any unwanted side effects from chemicals. 

Koreselect Stamina